Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition

by Kim Sterelny

WINNER OF THE 2004 LAKATOS AWARD!
Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind.



Featuresan exploration of the evolution of human cognition.
Written by one of today's foremost philosophers of mind and language.
Presents a set of analytic tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution.
Offers a critique of nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology, rejecting the example of language as a model for thinking about human cognitive capacities.
Applies to the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary psychology.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Evolution, Biology, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2003

About the author

After studying philosophy at Sydney University, Kim Sterelny taught philosophy in Australia at Sydney, ANU (where he was Research Fellow, and then Senior Research Fellow, in Philosophy at RSSS from 1983 until 1987), and La Trobe Universities, before taking up a position at Victoria University in Wellington, where he held a Personal Chair in Philosophy. For a few years he spent half of each year at Victoria University and the other half of each year with the Philosophy Program at RSSS, but from 2008 he has been full-time at ANU.

Sterelny has been a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at Cal Tech and the University of Maryland, College Park, in the USA. His main research interests are Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. He is the author of The Representational Theory of Mind and the co-author of Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt) and Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (with Paul Griffiths). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In addition to philosophy, Kim spends his time eating curries, drinking red wine, bushwalking and bird watching.

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/profile/ki...

Reviews

[Rick Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book attempts to summarize and critique the day’s thinking about how human cognition evolved. I read this with very little background, and learned quite a bit along the way. I might have learned more per page from Thought in a Hostile World than from any other book I’ve read. It’s loaded with coherently explained theoretical material, and with examples from animal behavior.
In the last ~30% of the book, someone loses attention to detail, leaving typos (which can be a real problem in a book which includes words like satisfice & amplitive) and unexplained jargon, that stymie us dilettantes.

[Zach Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can pick up this book without a background in evolutionary psychology or biology and still understand and gain much from it. I read it alongside Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Morality and found them to be fitting complements to one another.